ADJOURNMENT: Justices Breyer and Scalia wrote that the President could use the adjournment power to block Senate “intransigence.” “No President has ever used the adjournment power–certainly not to make recess appointments. But this idea is not novel.”

Key bit:

In that case, the Obama Administration asked the Supreme Court to view the recess-appointment power as a “safety valve” against Senatorial “intransigence.” The majority opinion by Justice Breyer rejected that position. Breyer explained that the President has other trump cards at his disposal: namely, the adjournment power. . . .

Justice Scalia concurred, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito. They made a very similar position: the President’s friends in Congress could help trigger an adjournment. . . . All 9 Justices seemed to agree that the adjournment power could be used to facilitate recess appointments.”

So there you are.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Red Pilled America’ Challenges Hulu’s Schlafly Series. “The podcast takes on ‘Mrs. America,’ a potentially one-sided look at the icon.”

CHINA SYNDROME: As Coronavirus Fades in China, Nationalism and Xenophobia Flare: Now that the pandemic is raging outside China’s borders, foreigners are being shunned, barred from public spaces and even evicted.

“The way they are treating black people, you cannot accept,” Mr. Mwamba said by telephone. “We are not animals.” . . .

A restaurant in northern China put up a banner celebrating the virus’s spread in the United States. A widely circulated cartoon showed foreigners being sorted into trash bins. African residents in the southern city of Guangzhou, including Mr. Mwamba, have been corralled into forced quarantines, labeled as dangers to the country’s health. . . .

Whipping up national pride has long been a tool for solidifying the party’s grip on power. In the short term, the nationalism may be useful to the central government, as it seeks to quell lingering discontent over its early attempts to play down the outbreak.

But if left unchecked, the vitriol risks isolating China internationally, just as the Communist Party seeks to use the pandemic to promote itself as a global leader. In recent days, countries that are usually friendly with China have denounced Chinese xenophobia, while business leaders have warned of difficulties operating there.

More reasons for decoupling.

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: Lionel Shriver: Whatever happened to dissent? The British have bought the lockdown hook, line and non-thinker.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How we fell in and out of love with the Laff Box, the laugh track machine that changed sitcoms forever.

Related: Why Sitcoms Stopped Using Laugh Tracks (Video).

SHADES OF THE CCP: Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going. But note this: “Almost all the passengers interviewed for this story say they’d cruise with the company again.”

THIS MAKES SENSE: Business leaders tell Trump on conference call: What the economy needs to reopen is much more coronavirus testing.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG. Hunter Biden Remains on the Board of a Chinese Company That Profited From Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy.

ROGER SIMON: Declassifications Show Durham Is Democrats’ Worst Nightmare.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This is worth breaking out:

First, one of the big lies promulgated by Mueller & Co. was that the Russians favored Trump. This was always dubious. The dossier makes Trump look terrible and since we now have evidence some of it comes from a Russian source, that the Russians wanted him to win seems pretty idiotic. As always, the Russians wanted to sow dissension.

More importantly, these footnotes expand the investigation considerably beyond the “mere” fudging of FISA applications to surveil Carter Page into areas of treason and sedition.

What in the Sam Hill was the FBI doing dealing with someone, Christopher Steele, they knew was being manipulated by Russian intelligence four months before a presidential election? In other words, they understood in July, or possibly even June 2016, that Steele was compromised, yet they continued with and expanded their investigation based on his information knowing it was false.

Why, if not for seditious or treasonous purposes? Someone has to explain.

Indeed.

OY VEY: You Won’t Believe This Mayor’s Excuse for Fining Christians $500 for Attending Drive-In Church Services.

NOT ANTI-WAR, MERELY ON THE OTHER SIDE: How I Was Interrogated By The New York Times.

Do you tell your sexual thoughts to your commander?” “Do you tell your secrets to your commander?” “Do you think an authoritarian organization such as the MEK can bring democracy to Iran?” “One of your friends has already told us he confesses his sexual thoughts to his commanders. Do you?”

Don’t be mistaken. This is not an episode of “Law & Order.” They are actual questions a New York Times correspondent, Patrick Kingsley, posed to me in January when he visited Ashraf-3, northwest of Tirana, the Albanian capital, where thousands of members of the Iranian opposition have been residing since 2016, following attempts by Tehran to wipe us out when we lived in Iraq.

I couldn’t help but find the Times’ approach an eerie reminder of the methods of the regime’s interrogators. When they arrested two of my friends, they tortured them to get information about other resistance members. They told one of them that his friend had already given all his information, so he too should give information about the others.

Well of course, he’s obviously suspect: why would anyone be opposed to one of the Times’ favorite tourist destinations?

STOPPED CLOCK: AOC Calls Out Hypocritical Response to Biden Sexual Assault Allegation: ‘Believe Women…Until It Inconveniences Us.’

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Now Is Exactly the Time to Investigate the WHO’s Catastrophic Public Failures and Internal Rot.

Such twisted standards at the WHO should come as no surprise. China began colonizing the WHO at least 13 years ago, when China’s candidate, a former Hong Kong director of health, Margaret Chan, became WHO director-general, serving for 10 years before Tedros took charge. Chan was already controversial in Hong Kong for her slow and bungling early response to the 2003 SARS outbreak that spread from China to Hong Kong. Under her leadership, the WHO’s response in 2014 to the Ebola crisis in West Africa was a debacle — leaving the U.S. and a number of private medical charities to ride to the rescue. Commenting on this at the time, a Nov. 4, 2014, Wall Street Journal editorial noted that “since the 1990s the WHO has devoted ever more of it resources to political activism instead of its core disease-fighting mission — a loss of function that helps explain why the WHO failed to contain Ebola when it was less rampant.” Sound familiar?

If we judge by results, then as UN debacles go, the WHO’s 2020 failures, fictions, delays and Beijing boot-polishing in dealing China’s coronavirus outbreak rank right up there with the UN’s decision in 1994 to ignore desperate warnings from its own peacekeepers of the impending genocide in Rwanda. In that instance, more than 800,000 people were slaughtered. For the current pandemic, the cost in lives and livelihoods is already colossal, and we do not yet have a full tally. It would be gravely irresponsible of the U.S. to simply carry on bankrolling the WHO. An investigation into its public failures and internal rot is urgently needed — now — before the UN’s erstwhile health agency steers the world any deeper into catastrophe.

Yes.

A BILL WHITTLE PODCAST: The Cold War: What We Saw | The Jaws Of Defeat – Episode 11.

YEP. NOT SUSTAINABLE OVER THE LONG TERM, NOR WAS IT MEANT TO BE: The Lockdown Is Loosening Whether Government Likes It Or Not. It was supposed to be a short-term solution to prevent runaway transmission while we made adjustments. We need to transition to masks and social distancing but with steadily reduced business closures.

Related: “If there’s a lesson from Michigan for other states, it’s that imposing overly-strict rules or trying to sneak pet policy transformations into precautionary measures will provoke backlash that makes public health goals even more difficult to reach.”

Plus: “If state and local leaders want their people to consent to COVID-19 emergency measures and be partners in public health, rather than antagonists, they should look to Whitmer’s examples as what not to do.”

IS THIS REALLY THE END OF GLOBALISM? Can you guess the answer from the conclusion of this sharp-tongued analysis by Hillsdale College Professor David Azzerad:

“Many Americans have also shown themselves to be uncharacteristically passive as state and local governments restrict civil liberties, release prisoners, and refuse to prosecute burglaries and other property crimes. It is a dispiriting thought that the legacy of the coronavirus could be a stronger state, a more sheepish and fearful population, and a ruling class even more dedicated to globalism.”

PUSHBACK: Pennsylvania State Senate votes to override governor’s stay-at-home order. “The measure, Senate Bill 613, would require the governor’s office to align with federal guidelines in determining which businesses will be allowed to reopen during the pandemic, allowing all those that can safely operate with mitigation strategies under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency guidelines. The measure passed the senate 29-21 Wednesday after passing the state House 107-95 Tuesday.”

So is this really about opening the liquor stores? “No state has done a worse job regulating the sale of alcohol during the pandemic than Pennsylvania.” Plus: “One way of looking at Pennsylvania’s liquor sales travails is as a failure of bureaucratic competence: Other states that control liquor sales have managed the pandemic lockdowns with far less disruption or danger. Another way of looking at it, however, is as a failure of the state control model. The fundamental reason why Pennsylvania has so thoroughly botched its liquor sale management is that the state has a near-monopoly on liquor sales within its borders.”

UCLA LAW DEAN JENNIFER MNOOKIN SHOULD RESIGN, AS SHE’S UNFIT TO HOLD HER JOB: UCLA Law apologizes for First Amendment scholar quoting n-word in class: Why does the dean have such a low view of her black students?

And students too fragile to hear the word “nigger” in a class about cases in which people use the word are too fragile to practice law. I’m happy that Eugene Volokh isn’t backing down, and he’s also right to criticize Wake Forest Law Dean Jane Aiken for attacking a professor who simply quoted Brandenburg v. Ohio.

Deans are supposed to support their faculty in challenging their students, not side with censorious pecksniffs. Those who don’t understand this shouldn’t be deans.

RELATED: Randall Kennedy: How a Dispute Over the N-Word Became a Dispiriting Farce: Since when is reading James Baldwin out loud in class an academic crime? Note that Kennedy mostly uses the polite term “the n-word,” which is what I started to do above, but also spells it out in full, as I also did, to illustrate what’s being said. I presume that he felt, as I did, that it would undermine the point to euphemize throughout.

HMMM: Navy May Reinstate Fired Captain of USS Theodore Roosevelt.

WELL, HE’S RIGHT: SAVAGE: Trump Slams Pelosi’s ‘Parties in Chinatown’ While He Was Restricting Travel From China.

RUSSIA: As COVID-19 cases spike in Russia, the Kremlin struggles to respond.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harvard University is not ruling out the possibility of closing campus until 2021.

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